Identity crisis and social dissociation in control societies

Abramychev Mikhail Mikhailovich ORCID: 0000-0003-0043-0644 Master's degree Student, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences,Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. K. Minina (Minin University) 603002, Russia, Nizhegorodskaya oblast', g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Ul'yanova, 1 abramychevmm@gmail.com

Gromov Bogdan Yurievich ORCID: 0000-0002-1306-7963 PhD in Philosophy PhD in Philosophy, Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. K. Minina (Minin University) 603002, Russia, Nizhegorodskaya oblast', g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Ul'yanova, 1 bogdan.gromov1989@gmail.com

              Introduction.

The question of the identification of modern society, considered in this article, is noted by a number of domestic researchers, which emphasizes the importance of posing the problem and taking a critical look at these spaces of questioning. Thus, A.P. Vyatkin characterizes modern society through a state of instability, expressed in the inability of the subject to grasp and identify both his own social and economic role and the general state of society ^[1]. At the same time, R.V. Penner highlights in the phenomenon of cosplay, which relates mainly to modern pop culture, the logic of gradual erasure of identity, which concerns not only individuals, but also the cultural situation of postmodernity as a whole ^[2]. In addition, M.S. Abirov demonstrates the increasing tendency of social dissociation in modern society ^[3]. These authors, noting specific shifts in the basis, allow us to focus on a specific object of criticism – the problem of naming modern society.

For a brighter highlighting of the intended issues and confirmation of the hypothesis of the study, the article is structured in accordance with rhetorical antitheses, the sides of the opposition of which may have an implicit correlation in places. Firstly, the antithesis "Politicization of psychopathology – attraction of madness" is highlighted, which allows to justify the analysis of attractions through the tradition of politicization of psychopathology. Secondly, by means of the antithesis "The woman in the attic is a mad rebel", evidence of a change of character is recorded, which entertains the "attraction of madness", that is, it demonstrates how madness becomes attractive, seductive and desirable. Thirdly, the antithesis of "Disciplinary societies – control societies", outlined in opposition to "Adoniram – Shepherd", performs the function of legitimizing the investment of pop culture images in terms of social philosophy.

1. "Politicization of psychopathology is an attraction of madness."

The conquest of the political struggle of intellectuals of the twentieth century, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Judith Butler, Irving Hoffman ^{[4, pp. 1-28]}, their students and followers, became a noticeable destigmatization of mental pathology. We must not forget about this conquest, because it serves as a reliable evidence of global progress in the universal development of mercy, compassion, empathy and liberation (empowerment). The writers Arkady and George Weiner predicted the advent of the Era of Mercy half a century ago in the novel of the same name, it seems they were right. Interestingly, social predictions come true more often if they are expressed in art than if they are expressed in science or theory. The fate of science is always to look back, generalizing (sometimes inventing) the experience experienced in one's own and someone else's past, the fate of art is to look into the future and the possible, to change the present, to bring it into line with the expressed image of the future. There is a saying "life imitates art".

Undoubtedly, the destigmatization of pathology is the result of a political struggle, which in turn fixes general changes in attitudes, and therefore highlights a special social significance that deserves thorough analysis. The destigmatization of pathology is thus an important evidence of the power of intellectuals and the real connection between political power and intellectual production. It is necessary to see in these two facts (the progress of charity and the political power of intellectuals) the marking of the disposition of the very political struggle, which is "the continuation of the war by other means" ^{[5, p. 148]}. This is a rather strange and unusual battle picture, in which everything is put into doubt, the outlines of objects are blurred, nuances, shadows and color transitions are more important than the objects that they indicate. The rear and the front of the "war by other means" are so close to each other that the boundaries separating production, supply, consumption – in a word, the entire logistics of the battle, are indistinguishable. Empowerment is in this war both a territory covered by war, and a resource, a weapon and a goal. Developing this metaphor, it should be said that in such a war there is no rear, but only a rearguard. Therefore, from the point of view of strategy, it is important to remember that the condition for the progress of mercy, which we started talking about, was the politicization of mental pathology. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Irving Hoffman, and other intellectual combatants have changed the front, which now marks the territory of normality.

In the social theory of the "postmodern", simultaneously with the appeal of the theory to the politicization of mental health, there was an intellectual fashion for the metaphorization of psychopathologies. It would be appropriate to repeat Frederick Jamieson's reservation: "I want to warn all possible misunderstandings about my use of this word: it does not perform a diagnostic function, its meaning is descriptive... We are also not talking about a certain diagnosis of our society, its culture, its personological features, as well as its art" ^{[6, p. 70]}. Jamieson speaks here about the diagnostician, implying diagnosis and treatment in an inseparable unity. That is, he is not going to talk about the state of society as painful or unhealthy, but only describe the current specifics of the life of the social body, in the spirit of "understanding" psychopathology ^{[7, p. 36]}. The peculiarity of the attitude of the diagnostician is that he does not seem to interfere with the course of the disease, but only identifies the process, in accordance with the register of templates, the names of which are described by science itself and placed at the disposal and care of a particular diagnostician. The psychiatrist-diagnostician recognizes the disease, in this sense, the diagnostic and descriptive functions of knowledge coincide, because a pure description would not make sense if there were not that stock of names that the diagnostician has. The actual function of the diagnostician is naming. Here we come to the defining question for the diagnostician: what is the name of modern society?

Before going directly to the question, it is necessary to point out that mental ill health, if it is postulated as a medical opinion, can be "delivered" only from the outside, as it happens in a medical institution in which there is a clear condition for "doctor – patient" communication. For social philosophy, social psychology, philosophy of culture, as well as for the whole complex of social sciences, such a statement "from the outside" is impossible, since the reduction of the relationship "researcher – society" to the relationship "doctor – patient" would be an illegitimate paralogism. There is no space in which a researcher can be denied social and cultural inclusion if this research is carried out by a native speaker over the space of the same language. The relevant method of the included analysis could be the phenomenology of the attraction, which distinguishes, in the spirit of M. Merleau-Ponty, the attraction of madness from the "horizon" composed by objects of popular culture.

Here it is important to look at the existing excess of names of modern society: society of control, consumption, performance, post–truth, figures, industry, post-industry, discipline, information, post-information, consumption, creative consumerism (post-consumption) ^{[8, p. 42]}, etc. Of course, the first thing that attracts attention in the above enumeration is the abundance of the prefix "post" in these names. That is, the names of the society are arranged in temporal orders, according to the principle of following each other in time. The names of the society are inscribed in the structures of sequences, associated with the names of past epochs. You can call such an obsession with a recent, but forever gone time in an ironic way "ghost society". Such a name will come in handy in order to return to the consideration of mental illness as a modeling system structuring the logistics of signals and fluids in the human body. The concomitant multitude of names of the same (society) must necessarily prompt us to think about the crisis of diagnostic knowledge and the expansion of the identity crisis in a society that has forgotten its name.

The discovery of such crisis spaces is the vocation of criticism and critical philosophy – it is always the coordinate support of the crisis, the surveying of crisis spaces of the spirit and toponymic activity in relation to such spaces. At the same time, surveying and toponymic activities are carried out by criticism through various naming procedures. We say and hear: "family crisis" ^[9], "crisis of tradition", "crisis of a quarter of life", "midlife crisis"; these and many other names serve as an articulation of many zones of stability and clarity within the social body. Criticism of the "family crisis", which may sound from the side of religion, will simultaneously separate and unite the family and religion, just as the father's abuse directed at the son is designed not to expel, but, on the contrary, to return the son to the zone of stability indicated by the reflexive pronouns "my son", "our family". The difference from such "understandable" criticism looks like criticism aimed at detecting uncertainty in the name.

The activity of criticism, both general and private, and distinguishing criticism from diagnosis, consists in carrying out a call by name, but not for identification or recognition, but in order to fix the duration of inhibition in the response of the one who is called by name. This inhibition between the cry and the response, measured by the time necessary to overcome the uncertainty in the name, is what criticism is looking for. It is by no means a polemic with the archaic or modern in the name of "returning to the fold" or, conversely, "modernization" that is its goal. And the temporality of criticism is not in its existence between epochs, but in the prolongation of the inhibition that reveals the space-time of the crisis. Disidentification and dissociation, which declare an identity crisis, are what critics are looking for.

Let's look at disorders not as a disease, in a narrow sense, and not as a special course of life, in a broad sense, but as a frightening entertainment. The Ahasuerus curse of the outcast was not imposed on the insane by the state, as Foucault says ^{[10, p. 20]}, states became the executors of insanity isolation long before society could formulate its attitude to insanity in the form of fear. The activity of organizing isolations, as described by a French intellectual, looks like a rather pragmatic, inhuman enterprise, but not emotional. But the man in the street's private fear of insanity appeared much later than the actual formulation of the status of a madman. Foucault clarifies that before becoming a "dangerous" monster from prison or hospital was "harmful", "vicious", and before that, just "idle" or "poor", even just "lazy".

A private, personal fear of the "madman", against whom the political struggle of postmodern intellectuals was waged, arises at the same time when a private reader appears, for whom a text, more often artistic or journalistic, serves as a way to look through the wall of Bedlam. We need to clarify: text and illustration, and later a movie. The frightening image of a madman passes through the form of an attraction in popular culture at the same time and in the same stages, as a mental illness in the form of a nosological unit passes through the prism of scientific analysis. Despite the fact that the stigma of a madman, his status as an outcast, is gradually disappearing, thanks to the political struggle of postmodern intellectuals, the attraction of madness, which led the madman to exile and stigma, does not disappear from cultural practices, but changes its dramatic gesture when the tragedy of madness becomes a comedy of madness, but not a funny comedy of fools, not a farce, but, on the contrary, a very serious, very boring comedy without humor, laughter or irony. In the transition from fear to amusement, it is important to point out the transmutation of the perception of insanity itself, supplemented by aggression towards the subject, which manifests itself explicitly and implicitly in all kinds of cultural products ^[11].

2. "The woman in the attic is a mad rebel."

Two images, quite recognizable and widespread, illustrating various dramas of madness are: Bertha Rochester and Tyler Durden. The first example with Bertha Rochester turned out to be quite forgotten, but it is worth remembering the fate of the "madwoman in the attic" to understand why the political struggle was waged, which was mentioned above, how important the conquest turned out to be, how irreversible it became, a real victory in the "war by other means". Maybe it is worth questioning the triumph of mercy celebrated by the politicization of mental pathology?

Bertha Rochester is a fictional character in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, the wife of Edward Rochester, the employer of the main character Jane Eyre. Bertha was forcibly married, gave birth to two children, and subsequently went mad, since she was prone to insanity from birth, like her ancestors. The reader of the novel "Jane Eyre" will learn little from this book about Bertha Rochester's insanity, about how Bertha herself experiences illness, what she sees and feels, what she complains about, what ideas she is tormented by or what she would like. The reader only knows that Bertha's insanity causes acute discomfort to her husband. For Edward Rochester, his wife's insanity is a shameful secret hidden from prying eyes in the attic. It should be noted that Bertha is hidden from all possible eyes: from her husband, from Jane Eyre, from neighbors, from children and from psychiatry. In Mr. Rochester's false humanity, which preserves Bertha's life and marriage with her, it is important to discern a special event of guilt. The acute, daily experiences of shame and guilt that Rochester is obsessed with construct a special mechanism for hiding knowledge, which is a truly terrible, secret, shameful secret of Rochester. Edward Rochester (the youngest son of an English aristocrat) is poor. Because of poverty, Rochester agrees to marry an unloved but rich woman, because of shame he hides his crazy wife in the attic, because of guilt he saves the marriage and the life of an unhappy woman. The plan to hide a madwoman in the attic surprises with its inefficiency – Bertha Rochester howls, scratches, makes noise, screams and cries. She scares Jane Eyre and the children, reminds all the tenants of the estate that a secret is locked in the attic. However, this imprisonment serves the function of a double reminder: shame about insanity, hides guilt for poverty.

The figure of the "madwoman in the attic" ^{[12, p. 28]} has long been known and described by feminist criticism, it was necessary to recall this figure in order to understand how the attraction of madness works in the case of Bertha Rochester. Bertha Rochester's madness scares, however, not with the torment of a mad person, because the reader knows nothing about Bertha's feelings and experiences, her madness scares because it is inherited. That's what's scary in Bertha Rochester's case – insanity is inevitable, irreversible, it is inherited from female ancestors, just as capital is inherited from male ancestors. Bertha Rochester is a Victorian Erinia who persecuted Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre because of the guilt, which is the poverty of the aristocrat of Rochester and the love of a married man Jane Eyre. In the plot of the novel, Bertha is a puppet, deprived of freedom, given as a thing at the disposal of a man, then abandoned in the attic, like a broken toy or a spoiled thing. What really scares is not this unenviable fate, but the inevitability with which this fate is prepared for Bertha Rochester. A hard-to-imagine, almost impossible, inimitable and unique innocence predisposes Bertha Rochester to insanity.

The case of Bertha Rochester, of course, is not limited to this description, in addition to its significance for feminist theory and many other systems of disciplinary knowledge, this character reminds us of the dark gloomy "doppelgangers" of Gothic and romantic literature. Perhaps the brightest example of a double in a popular novel is Mr. Hyde, a character in Stevenson's novel "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." It is necessary to see exactly how the installation of the madness attraction changes for characters with split consciousness from Mr. Hyde to Tyler Durden, the Hulk and the Horde (a character in M. Night Shyamalan's films "Split" and "Glass").

Hyde is a classic "dark double", he is scary because, firstly, he is "secret", hidden, hiding behind the guise of a handsome doctor, secondly, because he represents the inevitable onset of the "dark side" of personality, the predominance of bad, obscene desires, the triumph of debauchery. Hyde is as scary as Bertha Rochester's madness, because he is irresistible. However, if Bertha Rochester's madness was shown as pure fate, a punishment without guilt similar to the will of the gods or the laws of nature itself, Hyde inevitably comes not "from the outside", but from the inside, he represents the personal fear of a respectable citizen before the rebellion of his own suppressed desires. In this mechanics of madness, as a political revolt against suppression, Hyde is much more modern and understandable.

However, one should carefully correlate Hyde's character with his later incarnations in order to see how the attraction of madness in popular culture ceases to be frightening; from the fear room, he becomes a tantamareka – a photo booth with a hole for the face above a drawing of a famous character in a ridiculous or pretentious pose. Such stands are still found near beaches in resort towns, they seem to help tint the days of annual vacations, which should be bright, leave memories.

The Hulk character is closer in time to Hyde and (this has been repeatedly stated by the author) is his modernized version. However, the Hulk is not scary or frightening at all. What scares the Hulk is his boundless strength and uncontrollable anger, but not the unpredictability of a madman or the incurable disease. The same goes for Tyler Durden and the Horde. In the split personality of the Horde there is a "Beast", whose arrival is expected and anticipated by other personalities, but the Beast is simply unreasonable, like any beast, he is not mad, but simply strong and aggressive. A similar situation with Derden is a physically developed, aggressive, determined man. In these three madmen, it is not madness that scares, but masculinity, madness, on the contrary, looks more entertaining and attractive than scary. The fact that the Hulk is a frequent character in tantamores, that is, that many vacationers would like to portray themselves as the Hulk, is very indicative here. This fact describes the general mechanics of the madness attraction in the case of Tyler Durden in a radically different way in relation to Hyde or Bertha Rochester. Probably, few viewers of the attraction would like to be innocent mad like Bertha Rochester, but many would like to be mad with impunity like Tyler Durden.

3.      Transition from disciplinary societies to control societies.

How attractive and entertaining the disorder of social identity, represented by modern forms of the attraction of madness, looks, cannot but suggest that the manifestation of our dissociative "now", when the body of the social does not recognize its name or looks at its length from different sides, at its time, hiding behind one of many names, lasts because it is desirable.

This disidentification, which we observe in the cohabiting multitude of names of society, should be recognized as an essentially unified process. That is, we should not look at the uncertainty of the name of society as "just" a temporary disagreement of intellectuals about the name of the social body, but, on the contrary, we should arm ourselves with political paranoia and ask the question: is this disagreement a consequence of someone's ban on naming? The task posed by such a question is extremely clear, but it is easily unsolvable, because identification of the prohibiting authority is not enough to solve it. Moreover, the identification of oppositions to the authorities never serves liberation, but only accusation and reprisal.

It should be seen that the disidentification of consciousness, expressed in uncertainty about the name, occurs not as an experience, but as cohabitation or concomitation, comorbidity of neighboring and mutually burdening mental states. At the same time, one should not rush to assess such conditions as pathology. It is better not to give ratings at all.

In the work "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" Frederick Jamieson describes the specifics of postmodern creativity as a "pastiche", that is, a parody without parody intent, without mimicry and without laughter ^{[13, p. 110]}. Not a parody, but a return mode in fashion cycles, nostalgic revives and flashbacks. Jamison links the same process with the loss of a sense of history by society, when the past does not remain past, but becomes an obsessive-compulsive ritual. It is worth adding a number of compulsions, which Jamison cites as an example, with the insistent need for remorse and self-blame that society has been obsessed with in recent years, to see that the duration of pastiche, noticed many years ago, still lasts, and the obsession of compulsive flashbacks does not weaken.

All this state can be illustrated by deciphering one passage from Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript to Control Societies", written in 1990. Commenting on the transition from the disciplinary societies described by Foucault to control societies, he says that the individual of the control society is represented by a password, while the individual of the disciplinary society marked his presence with a signature ^{[14, p. 229]}. These two signs, the password and the signature, could have been taken by Deleuze from the Gospel and the apocryphal Masonic legend of Adoniram.

Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John contains a fragment known as the parable of the good Shepherd. "Verily, verily, I say to you, whoever does not enter the sheep's yard by the door, but climbs over the indus, is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is a shepherd to the sheep. The doorkeeper opens to him, and the sheep obey his voice, and he calls his sheep by name and brings them out. And when he brings out his sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, because they know his voice. They do not follow a stranger, but they run away from him, because they do not know someone else's voice." It is easy to see in this parable the same image as in the above arguments about the call and response. In this plot there is an identification of law and health, since the health of the sheep and flock is given and carried out in the care of the shepherd as the rightful owner and steward. The authority is at the same time the instance of naming, ordering through naming by name by the voice of the owner.

The difference between a signature and a password is precisely in the legality of ownership, or rather in concern about the legality of ownership of a username-password. To explain this thought, we should tell the story of the death of Master Adoniram.

Adoniram, also known as Hiram Abiff, arrived in Jerusalem from the city of Tyre, where he achieved great fame as a master of three main construction crafts: he was an outstanding carpenter, mason and master of metal casting. For his experience and merits, Solomon appointed Adoniram to lead the entire construction of the Jerusalem Temple, the main shrine of the Jewish people. The construction was so great that more than one hundred thousand workers were involved in it. In order to subordinate less skilled builders to more skilled ones and for a fair distribution of wages for work, Adoniram divided all workers into three stages according to their skills: apprentices, apprentices and masters. Each of the steps was given a password word, saying which it was possible to get paid for the work. To be initiated to the next stage, the student had to pass an exam confirming the skill and knowledge that an apprentice should possess, and at the next stage a master. A builder who passed all three stages, initiated into the master, thus knew all three passwords: apprentice, apprentice and master, and could receive a large fee. The legend tells of three apprentices who conspired by force, not by art and knowledge, to get the master's password. They waylaid Adoniram during a night crawl and tried to torture him to find out the password. Each of the apprentices struck the master with his tool, a hammer, a compass and a square are mentioned. Adoniram died from the blows inflicted, but did not give out the master's password. The apprentices, seeing that they had killed the master, hid the body, and marked the place where the body was buried with an acacia branch, so that later they could take the body outside the construction site. The next day, the craftsmen, not finding Adoniram at the construction site, began to look for him. One of the craftsmen found freshly dug earth, not a green acacia branch. When the grave was excavated, the masters saw that the body of the master killed last night turned out to be decomposed.

Conclusion

In the legend of the death of Master Adoniram, one should see the motive for the illegal possession of knowledge-a password reminiscent of the plot of the fall. Deleuze speaks of a digital language structuring stratifications in control societies by a series of admissions to information or denials of admission. It is necessary to supplement this model with the disturbing possibility of illegitimate access to information. The subject of the control society, having both a name and a password at the same time, finds himself forced to enter the door and "climb the indus", prolonging his uncertainty about the name of the Society-Which-Cannot-Be-Named. The feeling of having a name-password in this situation paralyzes the very act of naming, twists to the limit the paranoid movement of consciousness of atomized subjects, which leads to a loss of a sense of confidence.  The password here is a conditional cipher that opens up additional features, other levels of access. The password can also be the "name of society", since an unarticulated ban on pronunciation, as well as the lack of the possibility of its verification, turns the name into a cipher, the very existence of which produces subjectivity ^{[15, p. 144]}, that is, it becomes part of power practices. To know the name of society means to have stability in conditions of total social dissociation. But the symptoms grasped in the cultural layer of the reflection of insanity confirm the hypothesis of the presence of an unspoken ban on naming, depriving any manifestation of stability.

Mark Fisher, moving in the logic of Frederick Jamieson's thought, shows the lack of alternative to capitalism, in contact with the situation of the loss of the future, which finds expression both in modern pop culture and at the level of "psychiatric and affective disorders" ^{[16, p. 69]}. The organization of public practices that does not have any alternative, on the one hand, and a tangible future, on the other, will certainly face the problem of identifying the current state. The name is no longer possible, since the object of the name cannot be grasped in the immediate given. Atomized subjects, wandering in the "ruins" of the urban landscape, are forced to look back, plunging into a cycle of nostalgia for the past past, the progressive movement of which promised conviction in the specific name of the future, and the liquidated future, which became such as a result of slipping confidence in the present. The depressive-convulsive movement in attempts to seize the name is converted, for example, into the "schizophrenic-hontological sound" ^{[17, p. 106]} of the godfather of dubstep Burial, snatching out the ghosts of the future that has not yet come. In such conditions, the presence of a username-password is not only an admission to higher orders of organization of practices, but also the possibility of a more tangible perception of the "ghosts of society", reassembly of existing movement moves. The social crisis highlighted in the pop-cultural attraction of madness demonstrates the presence of a temporal lacuna formed by uncertainty in the name. Criticism directed at the duration, the time interval in which there is no response, thus leads to the possibility of overcoming the unspoken prohibition on naming, and therefore eliminating uncertainty about the name of the Society-Which-Cannot-Be-Named.